Beyond the Veil of Death is Not a Suitable Holiday Destination
by spellmugwump97
Summary: Harry knew he was clumsy, yeah, but he didn't think he was fall-through-the-veil-of-death-and-end-up-in-an-alternate-universe-with-superheroes-kind-of-clumsy.
1. Fiddlesticks

She's back, bitches! This bubbled up out of nowhere. I hope you enjoy. Inspiration would be amazing, please give me any ideas you can; anything you really want to see. Who knows if canon Harry is clumsy - but canon Harry also wouldn't go near the Veil if his life depended on it, so. I'm on the hunt to read this sort of thing too, so I thought I would put this out for good karma. Again - enjoy!

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He couldn't quite believe it. Of all the stupid, misinformed things he had been privy to in his life, this really did top it all. Even Ron, purveyor of flying Ford Anglia's and harvesting venomous teeth from mythic dungeons, would be astounded.

 _I've finally done it_ , Harry thought mournfully as he drifted. _I've finally done it this time_.

Harry would be the first to admit that he was really rather clumsy. Of course, he could hold onto broomsticks well enough, and he could walk in more or less of a straight line – but his arms were always in varying degrees of healing bruise. After jeopardising a stake-out by nearly falling out of the window he was watching from (sleep-addled and starving hungry because no, he would not eat porridge that many times a day, Kingsley) he began to seriously consider his spatial awareness issues.

He decided on the vast amount of time in his childhood spent either without glasses or with unsuitably prescribed ones. When you couldn't see what was around you in the first place it became rather difficult to develop a sense of spatial awareness in the first place, he reasoned. Not that he would verify his theory with Hermione – she would get that glint in her eye that said I am going to give you a cup of tea and talk to you about the benefits of counselling.

No matter the reason, he baffled those around him with his inability to remain uninjured, whether it be from his regular scuffles with Voldemort or missing his seat on a bleary Tuesday morning. It was probably the bane of Mrs Weasley's life. She had charmed the porch step to turn into a ramp whenever he came near.

A lifetime of clumsiness had brought Harry to the unfortunate situation he was now in. He was on an administrative (boring) trip to the Department of Mysteries. He was being harassed by Kingsley to deliver paperwork to him on a new scheme taking place, to encourage more interaction between departments. Harry immediately knew sending him would be a bad idea. He was the very man who had taken a sledgehammer to the delicate code of secrecy upheld by the grumpy Unspeakables who now drifted in and out of the Ministerial lifts sending glares at Harry's head. Kingsley saw this as Harry seizing the opportunity to avoid 'doing his job' as a 'representative of the Magical Law Enforcement Department' and as a 'cultural figurehead'.

The unnamed Unspeakable who was leading Harry through the Department ushered him at quite the alarming rate, sulkily making small talk on the way to whatever sacrificial chamber they had undoubtedly set up for Harry's arrival. That had, apparently, meant going through the Death Chamber, to which all the rest of the Department was centred around.

The melancholy of the room seized Harry the minute he crossed the threshold. He felt where he was before he saw it all again – the stone, the arch, the scorch marks that hadn't been there before he merrily came along to make them years before. It was a bone deep cool that scurried through his hair and wriggled its way under his fingernails until he saw them go blue, even in the dim light of the Chamber flooded everything with a tinge of grey.

'Must get along,' Mr Mysterious muttered, gesturing limply – much like his handshake – across the room. Harry followed him slowly, deliberately, eyeing the archway and giving it and it's whispers a wide berth. He wouldn't toy with that thing again, oh no. Not after Sirius had fallen through and successfully finished off quite possibly The-Worst-Year-Of-Harry's-Life. Harry would be edging around that platform it stood on like nobody's business –

The combination of old, loose, decayed flooring, clumsy idiots, and preoccupied minds, does not a happy outcome make. Harry found this out the hard way.

He grunted as he fell to the floor with the grace of a garden gnome. His hand flew out to steady himself, which, it turned out, was his fatal error. His wand clattered out of his hand, and as circular things are wont to do, began rolling with the force of the fall – Harry clambered towards it on elbows, registering the wand's movements in the split second he glanced up after he crumpled to the floor. He grabbed it.

'Oh, fiddlesticks!' Mr Mysterious gasped somewhere behind him. Harry looked glumly at his forearm, his wrist, his hand – and saw they had been enveloped by a nothing that was slowly dragging him into itself.

Fiddlesticks, indeed.


	2. Are you there God? It's me, Harry

He expected to be dead. Very much so. He would accept that he was and that this was some kind of punishment for the world's most pathetic life-ending if it wasn't for the breeze and the whispers.

Speaking of. The whispers were not only following him, but his paranoid mind was certain they were also having a giggle at his expense. He would say something back to them, hit them with a wry observation or two, a scathing commentary, if they weren't so terrifying.

Somewhere, in the back of his mind alongside repressed memories of Aunt Marge, was an instinct telling him that no, he wasn't dead, and no, this wouldn't last much longer. He trusted it, though he quickly reminded himself of his history with mysterious voices in his head. If you can't see where it keeps it's brain, don't trust it. Mr Weasley certainly had the right idea there.

It was quite calm, in this inbetween place. He knew that he was journeying somewhere, but it wasn't to Kings Cross Station to make a choice, and it wasn't to death's door either. Harry listened, straining his ears as if he were a newborn. The whispers… were no longer whispers.

They themselves hadn't changed at all – it wasn't that. He had changed. A calm had settled over him; a breeze had wafted through his stomach and lungs. He felt more like he was waiting in a hospital for a non-dangerous surgery, and less like he was being dragged backwards down the throat of a Basilisk.

The whispers were more gossiping, more talkative, as opposed to being hushed and hissing. They grew clearer, each voice gaining distinction from it's brothers and sisters. Harry couldn't understand the words, but he could understand that these were very much alive, and very much people. People that were calm. People that clearly weren't trapped in this strange space with him, because they had use of their vocal chords whereas Harry couldn't fathom speech.

'Yes, they are people.'

Harry's brain whirred, whiplash throwing his frontal lobe to the metaphorical back of his brain. He couldn't do anything physically, at least now he knew, for there was no way he would have stayed blissfully still otherwise.

He decided that the best course of action was to scream expletives as loud as he could into his own mind, hoping that somehow this being would understand all the emotion he heaped into them. Apparently, they understood, because they chuckled.

'I did not expect to see you here, Harry Potter.' It spoke, vibrating off of Harry's very bones. He asked it if he were dead, what this place was. His thoughts all ran together and his questions were not in the slightest bit concise, but the voice acknowledged them all the same.

'You are not dead, though I see you were already aware of that.' It paused, considering. 'You are in the place between places. But soon you will have finished your journey.'

Harry's questions bubbled forth, frothing over the boiling pot of his overcharged brain. Who was this? Was this God? Was this Death himself? Was this a deranged wizard?

'Harry Potter, you are too close for me to explain. You will discover soon enough. Farewell,' Harry sent out as much of a mental shriek as he could manage, feeling like a lunatic all the while, 'until we meet again.'

We better bloody not, was Harry's last thought before he landed, quite unhappily, on top of a limescale-ridden sink.

Well, he thought, he wasn't in the inbetween place – or whatever pathetic name Mr Disembodied had called it – anymore. Harry was being gently smothered by a disrupted pile of toilet roll, which he had clearly disrupted. He was resting on what felt like a jagged pipe, but was revealed to be a bottle of bleach. He groaned and rose, assessing his new collection of bruises. 'Christ,' he muttered, scrabbling for his wand which had become wedged in the plug hole, held in place only by it's resident congulated slime.

'I've been waiting for ten minutes! Dude! I gotta take a dump!' Harry jumped as if Hagrid had managed to sneak up behind him. With clarity, he remembered he was in a toilet. People used them on a regular basis. Even Americans, like this man, who was pounding the door as if he could prove something to it.

Harry wrenched it open, willing to escape and make his way back to something recognisable. He glanced at the ceiling, and saw only tile and wires hanging despondently low.

No sign of the veil here, then.

Baffled, he wandered out of the room and into a café. A café. That smelt of cheap coffee and polystyrene. 'Christ,' Harry said again, louder this time. An elderly woman close by stared at him witheringly.

These were the voices. Harry came to the realisation with a belly-deep, rumbling laugh. Ever since he was fifteen. These were the voices that they had all been so drawn to. They were being compelled by judging old women and teenagers who flicked sugar packets at eachother.

Unspeakables had been spending decades studying the general noise of what was, if the sign spoke the truth, New York's finest coffee shop.


	3. Confusion With a Side of Mocha, Please

Written to the tune of Apple's Fleetwood Mac Essential Playlist. Thought you might like to know.

Please, shove your ideas at me. I need them!

Love and thanks :)

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With all the confidence of a man who has nothing left to offer to the world, Harry ordered a mocha. In the absence of money, any morals Harry had left were high-tailing it out of the door in favour of the side of his brain that preferred caffeine to Doing The Right Thing. He confounded the thirty-something behind the counter. Besides, he only ordered a small, and the barista looked like he was two espressos away from trying to jump into a toilet of death himself. (Harry decided to call it that to try and trivialise the colossal fucking up he was in the midst of.)

The mocha was not the best coffee in New York. He hadn't been to New York before now, but he felt confident in his assessment. The shitty mocha (americano with granules) was about the only thing he owned right now — and he didn't even buy it himself.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Malfoy would be pleased.

Harry tried to think about his next move, but found he had about as much luck with trying to order his next plan of action as he ever did; meaning, with the finesse of Hermione on a broomstick. No matter where he went in life, however far he might progress as an Auror, planning and pragmatism were not where his strengths lay. He was certain the only reason he passed his training was because of his name.

He found comfort in the fact that it was probably also down to his taking down of the most recent Dark Lord as well. That thought alone kept him from sliding blissfully into a pit of impostor syndrome.

Morosely, Harry stirred countless dubious sachets into his equally dubious drink, staring at the table and at the grey street outside with equal dubiousness. He didn't need to go out there to understand he wasn't in his home world. Even without Hermione's year of alternate universe research (February to October, 2001), the lack of aggressive American wizards and witches storming into the cafe ranting about Muggle exposure (or whatever they called Muggles) was enough to prove to him he was essentially an alien here.

Thankfully, every universe Harry had been to had the comfort of shitty cups of coffee. He daren't try the tea here, but he thought tepid tea might taste just the same here as in his version of the world.

The door opened just as Harry dragged his eyes over to the menu board, content to sit here and sulk until they kicked him out. Intrigue blossomed in the space behind his ears — nobody had come in or left since he had been sitting here. It made it strange that nobody commented on his appearance, but he supposed that maybe they were used to clumsy idiots and the odd maniac materialising in the bathroom.

The man who had so courteously kicked Harry out of the bathroom was still lurking in there.

The man who walked in was so tall he had to duck through the doorway. Harry immediately disliked him because of this. His head was scarred, which somewhat redeemed him again because of Harry's history with matters such as those. Both he and the stranger flinched at the sudden baleful ring of the electric door. Once upon a time, that sound might have made the barista turn and greet the new customer with a smile. Now, the man in the apron simply paused before his sneeze and proceeded to continue rearranging the same three pots of mouldy coffee beans.

Mysterious Stranger looked around the cafe with a cheer that was obscenely out of place. He looked directly at Harry.

'Mr Witch!' He shouted, making the old woman who had glared at Harry slop her coffee into the saucer. She shot Mysterious Stranger a filthy look, and began muttering under her breath.

'Pardon?' Harry replied, as the man took a seat across the table from him. He lay his umbrella on the floor, not seeming to care that it made a loud clanging noise.

'I was told that was the term for your people?' Stranger looked confused. Harry felt sympathetic, and, with no Statute of Secrecy here that resembled what was in his own world that he could see, he decided to bare all.

'Uh, it's wizard for me. You know. Men and women, wizards and witches.'

'Ah!' The Mysterious Stranger immediately brightened. 'My mistake makes sense. We Aesir have not seen practitioners of Seidr for many years. Seidmadr for many more! It is a pleasure, truly.'

Frankly, Harry didn't know where to begin unpacking everything in this conversation. He longed for the uncomplicated life of two minutes ago, where his only issue was poorly blended coffee mixes and curtains that sent him to alternate worlds.

'Mate,' he began, faced with the smile of a self-satisfied mountain of a man, 'I think you've got the wrong person. I don't know what a — what you think I am. I don't know what that is.'

Mysterious Stranger frowned. 'You are not Harry Potter? You were not the one Heimdall spoke to?'

'Heimdall?'

'He sees all. He is the great gatekeeper —'

'I haven't spoken to anyone by that name recently. Sorry. Someone in your communications department hasn't done their job properly. But, well — I am Harry Potter.' Harry crossed his arms, jumper feeling stuffy. The man across from him appeared even more confused, and yet he became even more earnest.

'If you are the seidmadr by the name of Harry Potter, you have spoken to Heimdall.' Harry felt offended by his certainty, not least because it enforced his own descent into lunacy. 'Did you not just arrive in this realm?'

'Christ,' Harry said, in sudden realisation. 'That voice had a name?'

'So you have spoken to Heimdall!'

'I wouldn't call it the best of conversations, to be honest.'

'Heimdall advised me that you would be confused. It is why my presence is required here — you are indeed one of the more special travellers, Harry Potter.'

Suffering, Harry pulled some hair out of his scalp in search of relief. He found none. Who was this man, purveyor of random voices that haunted the space of nothingness between one 'realm' and the next? How did they know he was here? And, most importantly, why the fuck was he considered special even here?

Harry settled on the question he was most likely to get a prompt answer to. 'Sorry, but who are you?'

Mysterious Stranger smiled. 'I am Thor, Prince of Asgard. It is an honour to meet you, Harry Potter.'

Harry wandered if the granules that stuck to the sides of his coffee cup were actually hallucinogens. Maybe that was why the mocha tasted so off.


	4. Rudeness and Ridiculousness

'This might come across as a little rude,' Harry began, 'but I was under the impression you didn't exist.'

Thor chuckled good-naturedly. 'We are not the gods your people think us. We simply live longer, and so have appeared to many generations without much thought.'

Longer lives. Harry immediately jumped to wizards' longevity; their tendency to stick around for an extra fifty years. He began to reconcile himself with the idea before he caught up with the concept of generations as well as the fact that Thor was Thor and had therefore been waltzing to and from Earth since the Dark Ages.

Harry's teeth ground together for a second or two. 'Okay,' he replied in a smaller voice than he was happy with. 'I've come to another world where you exist. That's fine. Any — any others of you? Is Poseidon going to ambush me outside the door?'

'That man!' Thor exclaimed dubiously, ignoring Harry's look of alarm. 'Not that I know of!' He looked to be enjoying the — to him — hilarious conversation. Harry wished he shared the same sentiment. 'Of course, the rest of the Aesir are present too — the Allfather and Loki, the Warriors Three — I am not alone in the realms.'

'Um, I don't know who they are.' Offended and surprised, Thor's foot nudged the umbrella which rolled an inch with a screech against the linoleum as he grimaced.

'Not to worry,' he replied, 'you are from another world. You could not know. They must not teach of great legends in your home.'

Harry's mind sped back to his tumultuous time in Primary School. 'Oh, no, they do,' he began eagerly, 'I just didn't really listen — I mean, I was only young I suppose —' Harry petered off as he realised his attempt at redemption was failing miserably. The conversation lulled into an awkward silence. Harry rubbed his hands glumly on his jeans. He took a sip of his cold coffee, trying desperately to think of something to say.

'Is there any reason why you're here to greet me? Do you usually welcome whoever comes through the veil?'

'I do not usually welcome people to this realm, no,' Thor replied with a hint of aversion, apparently slightly bitter that not only did Harry know nothing of his friends and family, but also that he assumed Thor spent his time chatting with mortals in sticky cafes. 'But Heimdall requested I meet you on account of your past deeds.'

'You know of me — there?' Harry gestured vaguely above him, in the only direction he thought Thor's home might be.

'Of course.'

'But isn't this a different dimension to yours? How does that work?'

'Every world is simply a branch stretching from the Great Tree.' Thor nodded sagely. 'And Heimdall sees them all.'

'Heimdall ... the voice?' Thor nodded as Harry decided he didn't particularly want to delve into whatever the Great Tree was. There was enough for him to tackle without considering his entire existence was teetering on the tip of a metaphysical twig.

He stared into his cup, the granules staring back at him. If Professor Trelawney were here now, she would tell him it looked like a spider. Harry thought it was more of a squiggle after more consideration.

He had gathered more questions than answers. Thor had truly baffled him. Were there countless mythical beings up there, watching Harry's life? Why did the Veil spit him out here? Was it always at this location or did it move? Why didn't Thor visit his world — or had he? What other madness could he expect in this whirlwind of a planet? Was New York where London was and vice versa?

'So,' Harry started, wringing his hands, 'did you have a plan past meeting me here? What's the next step?'

'Ah, yes!' A thunderous clap of hands that neared too closely to size of Hagrid's. 'We are to go to Stark's — you will have heard of the Iron Man.' From the blank look on Harry's face, he laughed uproariously. 'This will be a conversation to enjoy!'

'Are we close?' Harry didn't have it in him for a trans-Atlantic flight. The thought of sitting in close proximity to any kind of person made him feel as sick as Ron in second year.

'Very,' Thor replied. 'Just a small walk.' With that, he immediately rose and strode for the door with unprecedented purpose. The umbrella swung menacingly as Harry watched him go in disbelief. I suppose he wants me to follow.

The road outside was bustling, bright and comparably overwhelming to the darkness of the cafe. People loitered and walked everywhere. Fumes from cars filled Harry's nostrils. A stray dog was urinating on a lamp post nearby.

Thor wandered across the road; somehow in the midst of the traffic a perfect pause emerged for him to comfortably stroll. Harry was not so lucky. In mindlessly following Thor he was subject to more than a few near death experiences. Harry preferred to blame it on the different direction of the cars but he knew in his heart he was just a blind idiot.

Luckily for him, he had a saviour. When a motorcycle came thundering towards him, the very moment Harry anticipated a shattering impact saw his back lurching up into the air in a blur of wind and whiplash instead.

Swearing, he was quickly deposited on the pavement next to a bemused Thor. Harry stumbled into the display window of the shop behind him, shocked that he had found something less pleasant than magical travel.

'Hey man, watch where you're going!' Harry looked up to see the guy who was judging him was, in fact, not just a guy, but a guy in eye-watering red and blue with sharp white eyes like streaks across his head. Before Harry could reply, they were around the corner of the next building.

What the fuck? Where was he?


End file.
